The hits keep coming from last minute E3 interviews, and this one's even free. Speaking to Videogamer, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli revealed that all future Crytek games with an online focus would be free-to-play.
"What this entails is that our future, all the new games that we're working on, as well new projects, new platforms and technologies, are designed around free-to-play and online, with the highest quality development. When we say free-to-play, we don't believe in a future of low-quality free-to-play, but triple-A quality free-to-play. As evident in Warface, our approach is to ensure the best quality, console game quality, so that implies budgets of between $10m to $30m on each game - so no compromise there - but at the price-point of 0 dollar entry. I think this is a new breed of games that has to happen to change the landscape and be the most gamer-friendly business model."
And he means all of them. The social aspect of a free-to-play game also stuck out to Yerli, and helped launch Crytek's new GFACE platform specifically around their upcoming Warface. It literally acts as part social medial experience, part online lounge for players to hang around between matches. This doesn't mean you're free to pirate Crysis 3, since that's a pre-arranged package good according to Yerli, but the future is undefined for the free-to-play model.
Toward the end, he even hints the fan-campaign to make a TimeSplitters 4 could be ideal for their GFACE format. But even that's just a coy answer by this point.
An entire crop of free-to-play games could be awesome and it certainly seems to be the underlying trend coming off of E3 this year when bows and arrows or cover-based combat aren't involved.
